


Mending

by valiantfindekano



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 10:28:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4518378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valiantfindekano/pseuds/valiantfindekano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After his mother's death, Hawke has some issues of trust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mending

The numbness hits as soon as they return to the streets proper. Some kind of lingering sense of vigour had propelled Hawke’s limbs out of the dark undercity; or perhaps it was that he did not dare look behind him at the pitying looks of his companions. But outside, when they can see the sky again and hear the quiet hum of a city alive, the last remnants of energy seep from his veins. Has Kirkwall always been so  _grey?_

Someone must help him home, because he cannot remember most of the journey. He does remember passing a group of Templars and finding he cannot muster enough willpower to scream at them and demand to know how they let this sick bastard apostate slip through their fingers to let him kill and defile so many innocent women. And later he can piece together that at that moment, Anders’ comforting hand fell from his shoulder and did not return, though he had been little aware of its presence to begin with.

It is worse at home. Hawke wants to sink to the ground on the other side of the doorstep and never move from that point again, but someone forces him to remove his bloodstained armour, and he really ought to bathe before changing into his finery but it’s hard to think of any compelling reasons to do anything. So numbly he lets his friends take care of him.

“You can go,” Hawke repeats a few times. “You can all go.”

Anders is the first to leave.

* * *

He is the first to return as well. It is late; the news is broken to Gamlen, and Hawke has been too aware of the stillness. He is exhausted; his whole body aches, not only from the cuts and bruises from fighting off corpses and shades, but every time he closes his eyes he sees his mother’s face again, the crude stitching and that horrible dress—-

It is all he can do not to voice his concern, that perhaps the Templars are not their enemy. They could have prevented this—should have, by their nature, and Hawke remembers wanting to shout himself hoarse asking how they could have been so blind. Anders is smart enough to catch his hesitations, though, and Hawke is too tired to mask them.

“Do you want me to stay?” Anders eventually asks with tentative softness. Or is it reluctance? Hawke is in no state to be analyzing the difference.

He sighs and does not move. “I don’t care.”

The sight of the mage’s retreating figure and the sound of the door shutting behind him as he leaves makes Hawke realise that the last thing he wants right now is to be alone.

* * *

It takes a few days before he is functional again. Not recovered; by no means recovered. It’s the hunger that strikes him first and forces him to move and to speak again, and the humiliation when Bodahn chastises him for not taking care of himself strikes him very curiously as the first emotion he’s truly felt other than despair since mother’s death.

“If you want to grieve as long as possible,” the dwarf tells him, pushing a plate of a freshly-cooked stew with the most divine smell in front of him, “then you’d better not die. You can’t grieve when you’re dead.”

Hawke’s brow furrows. “On the contrary, I imagine that’s all the dead have time to do. I doubt they celebrate.”

Bodahn looks conflicted. Wondering, Hawke guesses, whether to congratulate him for his old self coming through, or to warn him about hiding himself behind his jokes. But that’s always what he does; he is not proud to say he was the same with Carver after he died, with Bethany after she left with the Wardens.

He takes a deep breath. Work had helped, too; finding a purpose in protecting mother and Bethany. They are gone now, but he has friends that he did not have before, and they too have relied on him. Merrill always seems to need supervision, Aveline will work herself to death if he doesn’t assist her, and most of all Anders…

Recalling the mage brings, to his horror, a chill to his spine. “Fuck,” Hawke declares, and leans forward with his head in his hands.

“Eat,” Bodahn replies. It sounds worryingly like a correction.

* * *

The first time Hawke tries to leave the house, he is unsuccessful. As soon as he steps out, a few heads turn, and he can feel the weight of their gazes on him. Likely as not it is only the noise of the door closing that has drawn their attention, but Hawke immediately turns around and goes back inside, imagining all the awful rumours that must have spread across Kirkwall by now.  

It turns out, then, that the first place he can muster any energy to go to is the Hanged Man, and he can’t decide if that is pleasantly nostalgic or purely irreverent. He tells himself that he was meaning to go to the Gallows, to pick up herbs from Solivitus and do something about the cuts and gashes that he’s hereto ignored, but they’re healing quickly enough on their own. It’s his heart that needs healing more urgently.

When he says as much to Isabela—framed half-heartedly as a joke—her eyebrows shoot upwards. “Have you been borrowing lines from that drunken poet over there?” she asks. It takes a practiced eye to see the genuine concern in her features, however. “Oh, Hawke. It  _is_  good to see you. You know you’re welcome to call in a favour if you need anything from me.”

“Curious way of phrasing that,” Hawke remarks.

“Well.” Isabela shrugs. “You might get the impression that I care about you otherwise. Speaking of which–” She gives him the same narrow-eyed expression that Bodahn had given him. “Trouble in paradise, I hear?”

It’s tempting to be angry with her for trying to gossip in almost the same breath as she tries to console him, but Hawke can’t say he’s surprised. He can even believe it’s a manifestation of her concern, if he tries, though he has to wonder who she’s been talking with to inspire such a question.  “Kirkwall is hardly paradise,” he answers.

“No kidding.” The pirate’s fingers tap against the bar. “I’m sorry for you two. He’s devastated, but I completely understand your anger. I might’ve slit his throat to make myself feel better if I were you.”

Hawke winces. “That’s… comforting. Are we talking about Anders? Where is he?”

Clearly it isn’t the reaction Isabela is expecting, but she recovers quickly. “Back in Darktown, I would guess. He hasn’t been back here since that night. Do talk to Varric before you go looking for him, alright? He’s anxious to see you.”

* * *

Dutifully, Hawke speaks to Varric as she requested. Keeping up with the dwarf is an exhausting pursuit—it’s like he feels he has to make up for lost time and share every thought that’s crossed his mind in Hawke’s absence. He still laughs at Hawke’s halfhearted jokes, but for all his brusqueness in manner, he’s just as perceptive as the rest of them. The slow-witted don’t make it far in this city, after all. He can probably tell that Hawke’s wellness is hanging by a thread, and like Hawke, hasn’t any idea of how to go about treating it.

However difficult Varric’s conversation is, it’s not half as trying as the one Hawke has with Aveline. She hasn’t graced the Hanged Man with her presence in a while—bad for her tender reputation, no doubt—so Hawke makes the climb back up towards the Keep, and he can at least be grateful that it gives him something to focus on other than his own misery.

He thinks, as he passes near the Chantry, that it is going to be a long while before he can look at a Templar and not feel sick to his stomach. They aren’t the ones that killed Leandra, though, so what is it going to be to look a mage in the eye? A blood mage? He’d like to think Merrill isn’t even capable of such horror, but she was willing enough to accept a demon’s offer. Regretful or not, he’s chosen a dangerous sort of friend. She and Anders are both capable of terrible things.  

Aveline tries to be comforting. Hawke tries to dismiss it with the kind of jokes he knows that she hates, which has the welcoming effect of feeling like a routine, but the damaging effect of having her drive him out of the room.  

* * *

It would be easiest to return home from there. He could still hunt down Merrill at her house, but Hawke doesn’t think he can stand any more sweet offers of comfort. They aren’t hollow, and he will probably be hearing many more condolences over the next few weeks, but none of them will be bringing his mother back to him, and none of them are going to take away his aching sense of regret.

If only he’d been a little  _quicker._

That feeling is what eventually drives him to follow the paths down to the undercity. The expectation that it will be swarming with Templars with a renewed sense of urgency should perhaps be comforting—Anders is not the only apostate hiding down here, if he is clearly the only level-minded one—but instead it adds to his anxieties.

The clinic is busy. But not with Templars, and Hawke allows himself a sigh of relief as he steps inside the entrance. Immediately his eyes seek out Anders: the mere sight of him makes his heart flutter. It takes Anders a moment to notice Hawke’s entrance, busy investigating some ailment on a patient’s arm, but across the way their eyes lock.

“—One moment,” Anders says to the patient, and he picks his way across the floor towards Hawke. The greeting is none too friendly. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to see a healer.”

“What…?”

_I have a heart that needs mending._  “Nightmares,” Hawke answers truthfully. “They keep me awake, but I don’t trust the herbalists not to give me poison if I ask for something to help me sleep. I need someone I can trust.”

For a second he worries that he’s offended Anders, because there’s another drawn out silence, and Anders’ brow is knit together in a look that’s equal parts confusion and concern. Usually that means he’s about to say something stupid, and usually Hawke would take it as a cue to kiss him. He can sense that the gesture would be unwelcome right now, though.

“… I think I can help. Wait here.”

Anders returns to the other patient, and Hawke busies himself looking around the clinic. There are still bowls of milk out by the doors, if no cats are in sight, but it looks like someone has been drinking from them. Might as easily be urchin children as cats, Hawke thinks. Some of them might be as happy with dead mice, too, as the cats would.

Eventually Anders returns, and he ushers Hawke away to the back of the room. “How are you feeling?” he asks while he begins examining a collection of labeled vials. Hawke watches his hands; elegant, careful. But then he feels like he is intruding, and his gaze flickers back out towards the others at the clinic. Some of them are peering back curiously, and he considers that he has previously not been shy about his affection for their healer.

With his arms folded across his chest, Hawke gives a huffing breath. “Never been better. I’d have killed her myself ages ago if I knew I’d be in such good spirits.”

Anders flinches. “Why do you say things like that?”

Hawke decides to take it as a rhetorical question. He still has to say something, though. “Can’t be as horrible as the truth,” he reasons.

“No. I suppose not.” Anders still frowns. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” Hawke finds himself mirroring his friend’s expression. “Do you?”

Anders hesitates. “He didn’t kill your mother because he was a mage,” he says, voice dropping. “I know it made it… more horrific. For her, for you. But the mages of the Circle would be disgusted by what he did.”

“I know.” There is a touch of wariness in Hawke’s voice. He can imagine Anders has been planning a speech like this for days, brooding over it in the shadows of Darktown. The politic is hopelessly entwined with their personal lives, but Hawke realises how naïve he has been to think it could only bring them together.

“The Templars waste their time punishing the innocent while–”

Hawke holds up a hand. Another time—another victim—he might encourage such a rant. Part of him still agrees with what he knows Anders is about to say, the part that had feared for Bethany’s safety and wished the best for her, that same part of him that had fallen hard for the passionate and loyal healer.

Without a doubt Anders’ hands are stained with blood. Hawke would not claim for a second that his friends represent any kind of purity, and among them, he might be the worst. His efforts to ignore his pain have brought him to steal and to kill. Mages, Templars, cutthroats, traders…

But Anders? He’s turned to healing, to helping others rather than hindering them, and his mistakes are just that: mistakes, not deliberate choices he’s made in search of a little extra coin. It turns Hawke’s stomach to know that it was half of what drew him to Anders in the first place—and that he could have so readily forgotten it, to think he could be anything like that monster who took Mother.

Hawke squeezes his eyes shut, but it’s too late. All the exhaustion and pent-up emotion from the last few days is flooding him, and then tears are flooding his eyes and he can’t hear what Anders is saying to him for the rush of blood in his ears. He should walk away rather than leaving him to deal with this mess that he is, and yet—

“Garrett?”  

He tilts his head back, forces himself to take a breath. He’s ashamed that a sob escapes him with the gesture. “—I’m sorry. A moment. I’m…”

“Don’t say ‘fine,’” Anders warns.

“Struggling.” There’s a few old crates stacked against the wall, probably rotten on the bottom, but Hawke trusts them to catch his weight as he sinks down onto one of them. They hold, even if Anders looks skeptical. “Just wanted to see if you were alright, you know.”

Anders is trying to find a place to perch next to Hawke, looking somewhat cat-like as he assesses his options. But Hawke catches the way his lips part and his eyes widen, and then there’s a nervous hand brushing an imaginary stray hair from his forehead. “I thought you came about the nightmares…?”

“That too,” Hawke agrees, and tries to hide the fact that he’s brushing the last errant tear away from the corner of his eye. He can only imagine how they must be red-rimmed and dark-shadowed, but his unkempt appearance is the least of his worries at the moment.

Anders has settled beside him, close enough that their shoulders are brushing. A second later he presses something into Hawke’s hand. A small vial, the sleeping draught he had been searching for a few moments ago. “Here. Don’t take it all at once—just a drop or two should be enough.”

“Potent,” Hawke observes, managing to raise an eyebrow.

“Can you make it back on your own? What if you’re jumped by thugs?”

“I’d let them kill me.” He would put up a good fight, of course, but if there is a right time to be murdered by lowlife criminals, Hawke would say that this is it.

His answer apparently gives Anders some resolve. “That settles it. I’m helping you back. Stay right here—I’m going to help the other patients, and then we’ll go.”


End file.
